


Remember What You Told Me

by kototyph



Series: put your money where your mouth is 'verse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drunken Flirting, Ficlet, Las Vegas, Loneliness, M/M, POV Castiel, Timestamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-14
Updated: 2015-07-14
Packaged: 2018-04-09 06:01:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4336568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kototyph/pseuds/kototyph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite the glitter and flash of the city below the windows, visible even through the privacy curtains, there’s a quality the house has that this blank, bare little hotel room shares: an aching sort of hollowness, the kind that waits and yearns and waits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remember What You Told Me

“This house is going to kill you,” Anna had predicted, when she’d helped him move in. It’d been empty for years by then; just another abandoned stage for their once-large family, too many members now dead or missing to fill it. Castiel had only dull, dusty memories of the place. One or two reunions, a childhood Easter spent hunting coin-filled eggs in the weedy corners of the property.

“You’ll disappear one day, and they’ll find your shriveled corpse trapped behind a wall somewhere,” she’d said grimly, shutting her trunk with more force than necessary. “Or you’ll jump from the widow’s walk and splatter your brains on the front drive. This place is fucking haunted.”

She’s older than he is, and perhaps remembers more than Easter eggs. “Don’t come in, then,” he’d said. “And don’t visit.”

They’d been sniping at each other all day, her hurt over Castiel’s refusal to stay with her, his frustration over her refusal to see why he couldn’t. She was just angry enough to climb in her sensible little car and leave him there, surrounded by the bags and boxes containing the few things he’d bothered to keep in the move, the house looming huge and dark behind him.

He’d eaten the last of his fast-food meal from the road for dinner that night, alone at a dustcloth-draped table that could seat twenty. Cold, gummy fries washed down with flat soda, a pack of M&Ms from a gas station.

Castiel wonders why he remembers that, the jerky way she’d maneuvered the Toyota around the rusted gate they’d fought open, the unappetizingly waxy texture of the candy. She’d apologized, later, and he’d apologized too, but she never came back to the house.

She does have a point, he thinks, rising from the hotel bed to put his shoes back on. Despite the glitter and flash of the city below the windows, visible even through the privacy curtains, there’s a quality the house has that this blank, bare little room shares: an aching sort of hollowness, the kind that waits and yearns and waits.

He might be projecting. Castiel stares at himself in the mirror mounted on the door and tries a smile.

“I am going to go down to the bar,” he tells the tired-looking man reflected there. “I am going to get a drink, and I am _going_ to find someone to talk to.” He winces. “I’m— there are at least fifty people downstairs from the Boston and LA offices, and I’m going to have a conversation with at least one of them, and it will not be about the convention or anyone’s presentations or anything at all related to work.”

His reflection gazes back at him, bleak-eyed and unconvinced, and Castiel scowls. “I am leaving this hotel room,” he tells it, “and because I am not a shut-in or a hermit, or any of the other things Anna calls me, I am not coming back until I’ve had some kind of human interaction.”

With that depressingly low bar fixed in mind, he nods once, takes a deep breath, and throws the door open.

Then he pushes it closed, disengages the chain lock, and tries again.

The glass elevator is at the end of a long, quiet hallway, and it skims silently down the side of the building, all of Las Vegas rising to meet him in brash neons against velvet black. The doors open and he’s immediately assaulted by sound, a heavy bassline and hundreds of voices.

He edges past crowds of people into the lobby proper, which has been darkened to give the crush of people spilling out of the bar and restaurant area somewhere to gather. Looking at them all, clustered into tight laughing groups and glittering like the city itself, he nearly turns around and goes back to the elevator banks.

Get a drink, he reminds himself. The first step is the drink. Then he can think about finding someone he knows, or doesn’t. Just… someone.

Forty minutes later, Castiel still doesn’t have his drink, but he has managed to wash up against the bar itself after being batted back and forth by the waves of people mingling. He clings to the rounded edges for a moment, wedged in tight between a woman in a suit and one in nothing much at all, before dragging himself forward.

“Hi, uh,” he says, and is profoundly ignored by all parties on both sides of the bar. The bartender stares right through him, and somehow three people behind him get their drinks before Castiel’s increasingly demoralized hand-waving registers. His head tips and his lips move, a disinterested _what’ll you have_ swallowed whole by the music.

“Uh, beer. Beer please? Oh, uh, whatever is—”

Castiel ends up with a Miller product that tastes like lime mopwater, but he drinks it. And then he drinks another one, because the crowd’s too thick to leave and he has a feeling he’d be trampled if he tried. The dance music is loud enough now to make his head throb, and the woman to his right is shrieking with laughter, apparently not caring that her every wild gesticulation of glee jostles the man behind her. The bartender hasn’t given him back his credit card yet, which probably means he’s accidentally opened a tab, and well, if he has a tab, he might as well get a third.

Forty minutes after that, he has a fifth beer and a seat, miraculously, in a grouping of chairs near the open patio doors. The sweltering Nevada night bleeds inside, turning the air sluggish and heavy in his lungs. Or is that the beer? Castiel considers the peeling label, rubbing absently at the sticky bits of glue left on the bottle. He wonders if the bartender counts towards the arbitrary goal he’s set, though their conversations were mostly pantomime and headshakes. He wonders if he should turn to the group in the chairs next to him and say something. What, he doesn’t know, but it should be easy enough to start a conversation. Most of them are at the stage of inebriation where helping arms and the furniture are only things keeping them off the floor.

He’s fairly drunk himself, the simple act of turning his head enough to send it spinning. “Hello,” he says to the girl next to him, swaying a little. “I— how are you liking the city?”

She doesn’t hear him, too engrossed in another person’s story, but her immediate neighbor, probably a boyfriend, notices and after a few nudges from him, she turns to Castiel with a confused stare.

“Hi, sorry?”

“I was just—” More of them are turning to stare, and Castiel has to fight to keep his eyes up off the sticky wooden floor. “Sorry. Hello. I was wondering— I can’t find my, my friends in this crowd. I was wondering if I could, uh, join you.”

“Um, sure,” the girl says, eyes flickering anxiously to the group and back. “My name is Krissy?”

“I’m Castiel,” he says.

“Oh, that’s a cool name!” she says, so obviously trying to seem interested, and then the half of the group furthest from Castiel starts up another thread of conversation and even Krissy’s boyfriend joins that, rather than stay in the painfully awkward bubble of silence that surrounds the girl and Castiel.

“So, um, where are you from, Castiel?” she tries after a long, long pause, gamely.

“Oh, east. New England. I live in Boston, on the coast,” he says. “I’m here for a convention. For work.”

“Oh, that’s cool.”

“I work in finance,” Castiel clarifies.

“Cool.”

She fidgets with her purse, and looks up at her friends when one of them bursts out laughing, then back at him.

“I’m going back to the bar to get another drink,” he abruptly decides. “I’ll, um. See you around.”

She looks a little unnerved, and Castiel quickly adds, “And if I don’t, have fun in. In the casinos.”

“Okay,” she says, still a bit wary. “See you.”

Castiel stands on legs that have gone mysteriously wobbly since he sat down, and prepares to reinsert himself into the sea of partiers with every intention of going directly to the bar, claiming his card, returning to his room, and not coming out again until exactly two hours before his flight leaves tomorrow morning.

What happens is that a man comes stumbling backwards out of the crowd with a surprised laugh and hits Castiel squarely in the chest, with enough force to nearly tip them both over Castiel’s just-abandoned chair.

“ _Whoops!_ ” the man shouts cheerfully, craning his head back as his arms come up to grip Castiel’s. He is— gorgeous. And familiar. “Hey, thanks, man.”

“Uh,” Castiel says.

Which is when Dean Winchester, sales team Dean Winchester, office celebrity Dean Winchester, water-cooler-gossip Dean Winchester, amazingly beautiful, good God are those freckles _Dean Winchester_ snaps his fingers in Castiel’s face and says, “Hey, I know you.”

“Is this asshole bothering you, sir?” someone says dryly, and two other men Castiel recognizes as part of the sales team grab the front of Dean’s shirt and haul him back onto his feet. “Sorry about that, we were just putting him to bed—”

“Fuck no!” Dean laughs, twisting free of their hands and ducking behind Castiel. Without any kind of warning, his arms wrap around Castiel’s waist, warm and tight, and he hooks his chin around Castiel’s shoulder. Castiel exhales sharply, and doesn’t move. “Stay the hell away from me, you lame-ass motherfuckers. I got shit to do,” Dean says, breath hot and beery on the side of Castiel’s face.

“Dean, I’m gonna use little words,” the more thickset one says. “It’s late. You’re hosed. Let the scared stranger go.”

“No, it’s Castiel! It’s Castiel, say you’re you, Cas. Cas from Accounting. _Castiel Milton the accountant from Accounting._ ”

“I— Assistant Controller of Finance,” Castiel manages to make himself say.

“Jesus, Dean,” one of the men groans. “Trust you to make an ass of yourself with someone we _work_ with. Sorry, uh, Castiel.”

“No, Cas is cool,” Dean says stubbornly, squeezing him tighter. “So much cooler than you assholes. Hey, Cas, you wanna get out of here?”

“Get out of here?” Castiel echoes dumbly, transfixed by Dean’s bare forearms where they cross over his stomach.

“Yeah, out of here. I’ve got a shitton of things to see and these guys are _bailing_ on me.”

“Because you’re fucking wasted and our flight is at ass o’clock tomorrow, Dean,” the other man says, less than patiently. “And there’s always next year.”

“Whadya say, Cas?” Dean says, loosening his hold enough to turn them to face each other, hands sliding up to grip Castiel’s biceps. “Want to go on an adventure?”

“Go on an,” Castiel mumbles, because Dean’s smile is huge and his eyes are bright and he looks so genuinely thrilled at the idea Castiel might say yes. “An adventure?”

“Fuck me, your pick-up lines are terrible,” one of the men says, starting forward again. “Don’t take him up on that. Trust me, you’ll regret it in the morning.”

“We’ll go everywhere,” Dean says, not even acknowledging him. His eyes have turned pleading now, voice dropping into a low, intimate murmur as he leans in close. “Everywhere. All the buffets and fountains and casinos and shit, we’ll be out all night and sleep on the plane. Come on, Cas, come with me?”

“Dean, let the man—”

“Please?”

“Yes,” Castiel says, and takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Yes.”

“ _Mon Dieu_ , please don’t encourage him—”

“Yeah?” Dean says, starting to grin.

“Let’s go,” Castiel says, heartbeat high in his throat and nearly stuttering over the words with how fast he wants to get them out. “I want to see it. I want to see everything.” God, does he want to.

“Everything!” Dean promises, grinning like a lunatic, and grabs his hand. “Every-fucking-thing, Cas, we’re gonna do it all.”

The last thing Castiel sees, before Dean leaps for the exit with a whoop and drags him along, is Krissy, giving him a thumbs-up.


End file.
